by Earl Emerson
I sat on a small cookie-cutter concrete curb that ran around a flower bed to think things out. After a while, I heard some clicking. I turned around and found Stephanie fumbling with the door. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a number pad here. If we could only figure it out.”
Just below the knob was a numerical code pad with ten buttons lined up vertically. “Try seven, five, four, zero.”
She punched the numbers, pushed the door open, and gave me an astonished look. “How did you know that?”
“Isn’t that your aunt’s birthday?”
“Oh, you’re a genius.” I stepped inside in front of her. “Wait a minute. She wasn’t born in July. She wasn’t even born in 1940.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No.”
“You have your cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“We get separated, go straight to the car and get out of Dodge. I’ll call you later, and you can pick me up.”
“I’m going to stick with you.”
“No dice. We’ve already been over this. First sign of trouble: run.”
“Why don’t we just both go to the car?”
“I’m telling you the way it’s going to be.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing. When I’m gone—” She touched her fingers to my lips in an attempt to stop me. “However it happens with me, I want you to open yourself up to the world. Marry if you find someone who you can love and who’ll be a good father to the girls. I want you happy. I want the girls to have a family. They deserve it. You deserve it.”
“Oh, Jim.”
“Maybe after a couple of years you could shoot some air into my veins. You don’t have to promise or anything, but it would be nice if I knew I wasn’t going to spend four decades staring at a lightbulb thinking it was God.”
On that cheerful note, we tugged on our latex gloves and commenced burgling.
57. A STACK OF LETTERS FROM A DEAD MAN
In the atrium by the reception desk a smattering of red, yellow, and violet floor lights shone from the bottom of the shallow fish pool, but most of the light in the building came from street lamps outside in the parking area.
We checked Margery DiMaggio’s offices upstairs, her old office, which was unlocked and filled with cardboard boxes, and then her new office, which was locked but which had glass in the door, an unlikely amenity for such a security-conscious company.
Knocking out the glass with the pry bar, I reached inside, unlocked and opened the door to the smell of fresh paint. The spacious office suite had oak furniture and a tall oak cabinet at one end of the room.
The cabinet turned out to be a bar. Cognac seemed to be the drink of choice here. I took a sip of soda water and looked around while Stephanie riffled through the papers in her aunt’s desk. The file cabinets were unlocked. Switching on a small lamp, I pawed through them and found routine business mail, records of meetings, financial statements, copies of letters concerning various research grants, letters to vendors, bids for work on the campus, contracts for janitorial service, letters to universities asking about various metallurgy projects and research.
“Most of this is personal,” Stephanie said, slamming a desk drawer angrily. “Pictures from her trips to Hong Kong. A boyfriend in New York City. I didn’t know she was seeing anybody. Some married guy, works for Scientific American. What’d you find?”
“Nothing pertinent.”
It was a luxurious office, designed to display power and ease. It even had its own adjoining sitting room and spacious shower facility with sauna, both with separate exits leading to the corridor. I went to the window and gazed out at the parking area below. The trees directly in front of the building had been cut down so that from this office and the one on either side the view was unimpeded as far out as the dark guard kiosk by the street.
“Hey. Check this out,” Stephanie said. “There’s a folder on some guy named Armitage got fired for embezzlement. He wrote them a letter about my uncle’s death. Claims Phil DiMaggio got sick downstairs in the lab and died the next day.”
“Is that true?”
“They told me he was driving down I-405, got into a road rage thing with some other driver, had a heart attack, and drove himself to Overlake Hospital. Armitage claims he got sick from chemicals he was handling. Apparently, he’s been making this allegation for a while, because he says here: ‘Despite your assurances to the contrary, I cannot help but feel Dr. DiMaggio’s demise can’t be directly attributed to anything other than the materials he was working with on the twelfth of October. Nor can it anymore be deemed a coincidence or an accident that Ms. Janet Beechler, who had been in the room when Dr. DiMaggio was handling said materials, suffered a fatal automobile accident the night following his death.’ ”
“A fatal accident? You think they were killing witnesses two years ago right here in Redmond?”
“Could be sour grapes; they’d already fired Armitage when he wrote this letter.” Stephanie glanced back at the papers. “Here’s a letter from my aunt saying Beechler’s car accident happened because she was distraught over her boss’s death. She says they had the best physicians in the Northwest caring for her husband. That he had a bad heart. I don’t know if that’s true, but why bother to answer a crank letter from a man you’ve just fired for embezzlement? The next set of letters are copies of letters to Armitage from Canyon View’s attorneys. They’d apparently threatened to turn evidence of embezzlement over to the Redmond Police Department if he didn’t go away. I wonder if Armitage was talking about Uncle Phil’s death before he got fired.”
Stephanie handed me a newspaper clipping. “This would have been four weeks later.”
Puyallup Man Dies in Car Wreck
Last night at 2:20 a.m. witnesses saw a tan and gray Bronco leave the roadway on I-405 and roll down an embankment, where it burst into flame. By the time the fire department reached the Bronco, it was too late to rescue the occupant, who died at the scene. The driver was William Atherton Armitage, 42, of Puyallup. Police said the vehicle had a number of empty alcohol bottles inside. It was not immediately known whether Armitage had been drinking.
A spokesperson from Canyon View Systems, Armitage’s employer until last week, said Armitage had been distraught over the death of a coworker and had recently lost his position at the company amid a flurry of charges and countercharges involving the theft of $300,000 from the firm.
“There’s more. She’s got files on five former employees who are all either dead or in nursing homes. All . . . yeah . . . two are dead and three are in nursing homes. It doesn’t say what’s wrong with them, but I have their ages. Twenty-seven, thirty-three, and thirty-five.”
“Not your normal nursing home clientele.”
“Neither was my sister. Neither are you.”
“A nursing home’s not a bad way to go. Especially if they serve you pudding every day.” I made an idiot face. I was getting pretty good at it.
“Stop it.”
I’d noticed industrial eyewash stations in the hallways. Also, Marge DiMaggio’s shower was no ordinary shower facility. There were three stalls, each separated by a berm and a wall, so that an individual could step from one to the next, working his or her way down the line. At the end of the row there was a stack of operating-room blues, face masks, and a box of latex gloves. It was the same type of wash-down arrangement the fire department would construct to run people through after a hazardous materials exposure.
“Check this out,” Stephanie said, calling me into the main room. Near the office door, she switched on an ultraviolet lamp. The room lit up, but not by much. “Remember black lights? What do you think this is for?”
“So they can paint each other with phosphorescent finger paints and run around in the dark nude?”
Stephanie was not amused. I was getting goosey. My time was running out, and instead of becoming more and more nervous, I was looser than I’d ever been. Almost slap-happy. It was as if I wer
e inebriated.
Downstairs, we found enough eyewash fountains and shower facilities to clean up a rugby team. We broke into three more offices and found work areas—labs, chemicals, machinery, spectrographs, a miniature smelter in a room with concrete walls. All of it was tidy. All of it was ready for a white-glove inspection by a prospective buyer.
Stephanie found the labs fascinating, flipping through notebooks she found and examining the high-tech equipment. We broke into several locked cabinets, but they contained nothing but standard lab supplies.
If we were right, these bastards had infected innocent people from Tennessee to Washington State and now were covering their tracks like a blind cat burying shit. Ironically, there were SAFETY FIRST signs in every corridor.
Stephanie had turned on the lights and was peering into a microscope. I could tell by the way she gripped the dustcover, she was nervous as hell.
I said, “Let’s go back to your aunt’s office.”
“I want to look around here. This is where they work. There’s got to be something.”
Somewhere in the building a telephone rang. We looked at each other, and Stephanie stopped breathing. The phone rang eight times before it stopped. “A telemarketer,” I said.
“At eleven o’clock at night?”
I shrugged. “I’ll be upstairs. Somebody shows up, you scream. I’ll do the same.”
“Sure you will.”
Upstairs in DiMaggio’s office, I circled the room trying to figure out what was bothering me. They had to be keeping it on the premises, in either this building or the one we’d bypassed outside. They had to have a substance that turned people into zombies. A product potent enough that they maintained shower facilities on all three floors. A product that might be neutralized with something as simple as soap and water—for I’d found nothing else in any of the showers. Where would they keep this product? Better yet, where would they keep an antidote for it?
Sitting with my feet on DiMaggio’s desk, I paged through the letters Stephanie had unearthed. I’d been there a few minutes when visions of Achara’s charred corpse popped into my head. It was hard to put something like that completely out of mind, particularly if the victim was someone you’d known and liked. Achara had taken a risk giving me those numbers. The first series had been the combination to the keypad on the downstairs door, but what about the second series?
Without consciously thinking about it, I walked across the room to the liquor cabinet, went into the bathroom behind the wall, and found a void behind the cabinet. I’d seen it earlier but hadn’t guessed the significance.
It took a few minutes to figure out that the liquor cabinet was on wheels and that moving it to one side would expose a tall gray door to a hidden vault. Somehow Achara had known I might be here before the week was out.
In giving me the combination to this vault, if indeed that’s what the numbers were, she’d accurately gauged the urgency of my desperation as well as the depth of her employer’s obfuscation. There had to be something in here she needed on a regular basis, something Achara needed to access when the boss wasn’t available.
Sixteen years of memorizing Scripture finally paid off in something more meaningful than being able to take down women’s phone numbers without a pen and pad.
18-24-18-63-08-46.
I worked the dial carefully and at the end of my troubles heard nothing. If I’d dialed the correct combination, there had been no confirming click to acknowledge it.
However, when I pulled on it, the heavy vault door swung wide.
58. HEY, LADY-KILLER: GET RELIGION;
SAY YOUR PRAYERS; DON’T SPILL
The vault interior was eight feet tall, five feet across, and maybe three and a half feet deep. There were five shelves, a gray cash box the sole squatter of the upper shelf, notebooks and manuals stacked on the two shelves closest to eye level, vials in racks on the shelf at belt level, a collection of dust balls on the first shelf above the floor. On the floor were two large corrugated cartons, one taped shut, one open.
I examined the notebooks and a manual, but the jargon contained so many formulas, they might as well have been authored by aliens.
The first three vials were labeled hydrochloric acid, sodium azide, and sodium cyanide—not the ingredients you wanted to drop in Aunt Maud’s tea. I was no chemist, but I’d had my share of hazardous materials classes for the fire department and knew hydrochloric acid and sodium cyanide shouldn’t be mixed. Sodium azide was a poison if taken orally and lethal enough that even contact with your skin was to be avoided. Two years ago it had been the centerpiece of a shocking story about a pair of teenagers who’d broken into a factory in Massachusetts and gotten it on themselves while looking for cash and drugs. Both died. God only knew why Marge was keeping it in this vault or what they used it for here.
Dangerous as they were, these weren’t chemicals that would send your brain back through twelve million years of evolution. No. We were looking for something else.
I knelt and peered into the open cardboard box on the vault floor. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a carton of Bibles. I pulled the first three or four out and examined the black leather bindings in the dim light.
Last February Holly’s truck had been carrying Bibles.
I picked out a book and leafed to a random passage, something William P. Markham had taught us to do. My index finger fell on Ecclesiastes 2:20–21: Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun. Yeah, me, too. According to Markham, a random opening of the Bible would be directed by God; thus, whatever passage you turned to was given to you by God, meant for you specifically, a message from above, the word of God out of his mouth. Before his stroke my father often let his Bible fall open at random. If he happened on a passage he didn’t like, he continued the process until he found something more to his taste.
I recited the next verse in Ecclesiastes from memory. “ ‘For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.’ ”
The passage was about two emotions I had come to know well: despair and vanity. I was in despair because of my situation yet had enough vanity left to think I counted for something in the grand scheme of things, that I was more than a molecule on the ass of a flea crawling across a map of the universe. There was only one problem.
I wasn’t.
I was the same as every other human on the planet, and when the final random asteroid came hurtling through space to take us all out in one big flash, to pitch us into the inferno, our destruction would no more be directed by William P. Markham’s God than by a finger randomly placed in the Bible.
How I wanted to believe in a God. I envied believers, no matter what their persuasion. Maybe that was the despair the passage in Ecclesiastes had spoken of. But wasn’t it the ultimate vanity for me to think I was important enough that a God a billion light-years away had enough interest to orchestrate my days and nights, mine, Jim Swope’s?
There were probably countless habitable planets for a God to keep track of, and here he was letting little old me have this fender bender, giving me a good job, giving me a wonderful pair of daughters, letting my wife leave me, turning me into a veggie—all because it was part of some grand scheme that would make sense somewhere down the line.
What if God had put a single germ on the planet Earth a billion years ago and was coming back in another billion years to see what had come of it? What if that was all there was to his plan?
It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to believe.
More than anything I wanted to believe in a Lord who would rescue me. Yet, no matter how hard I wanted it, I couldn’t convince myself there was a God or that God provided an afterlife.
I opened six or eight Bibles from the open box, then ripped the shipping tape on the second box, which, according to the label, had been freighted in from Tennessee.
&nbs
p; Fancy that.
More leather-bound Bibles. I took one out and turned it upside down, flapping the pages as if to dislodge a bookmark. Something broke on the floor at my feet and I heard the hollow, tinkly sound a shattered Christmas tree decoration might make.
The floor around my feet glinted with tiny jewel-like shards of glass. I’d dropped a small glass ampoule. Pieces of broken glass were everywhere, on my shoe, in my pant cuff, on my sock. Alert not to cut my hand through the latex glove, I brushed them away.
When I inspected the inside of the Bible, I found a section of the Old Testament cut out with a razor knife, just enough to accommodate the vial. I opened four more Bibles before I found a second ampoule. When I had six of them, I lined them up on a nearby chair.
Each was stoppered with a tiny synthetic cork and half filled with a greenish-gray powder that looked like ground pencil lead. None of the ampoules were labeled.
Canyon View appeared to have more use for religion than I had.
There were another thirty or so Bibles in the boxes, no telling how many more ampoules. When you thought about it, a book made a relatively secure container. After all, it had taken a whole lot of mishandling to burst the boxes in Holly’s truck.
Moving to the desk across the room, I sank into Marge DiMaggio’s plush leather swivel chair and pulled the telephone across until I could read the dial pad from the light of the street lamp outside. Stephanie answered her cell phone on the first ring.
“You all right, Jim?”
“I think I found the mother lode.”
“What is it?”
“You have to see it.”
“Be there in a minute.”
She was breathing heavily when she burst through the door, her hair tossed back with the speed of her movement. “Don’t move from the doorway,” I said as she started into the room.